Designing writing/designing reading: Textual ontologies and poetic practice

Standardized writing and reading practices in academia are well established. The academic book, article, dissertation and the report are all familiar in terms of both form and content. But due to the various forms of standardization it is often hard to challenge the Mandarin diseases of ‘group’ thought and instruction that Universities breed in imposing their own strict writing and reading protocols and forms of pedagogy. (Alongside these things sit all the evaluative forms and kinds of assessment machinery that go with the practice of trying to count and measure everything that academics or students produce.) So if we need to consider new ways to design writing and reading we should think more about the way in which we actually live with text, both virtually and actually. In order to present new semantic challenges for new writers and readers, then, we need might need to look at the ways that other practitioners from different fields and disciplines use and create (and curate) writing and reading – where ‘con’ (with) combines with ‘textere’ (weave/text) so that the text is woven with new meanings. In what follows, then, I will consider how a poetics of textual practice may start to encourage students to engage with richer, and more carefully designed, forms of meaning. More specifically, I wish to draw on various tasks that can be set to encourage student designers to put more meaning into their writing by making challenges to form. The production of writing and reading can be considered as integral to the research and ideational processes of design work. And so how graphic design can engender, unfold and fuse with other creative practices such as poetry may be important in enabling new textual rhythms, harmonies and melodies to develop in the subject of design.